The chief executive behind ChatGPT says shorter weeks will share gains from AI and address growing public concerns about the impact on employment
The Times
Sam Altman has called for companies to pilot a four-day working week to convert artificial intelligence productivity gains into time back for workers.
The chief executive of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, said employers and unions should be incentivised to run 32-hour or four-day working-week pilots with no loss in pay so that workers receive an “efficiency dividend” from the benefits of AI.
OpenAI published a 13-page blueprint on Monday outlining ideas for how policymakers should respond to AI disruption by reimagining the “social contract”, as fears grow about the potential for the technology to lead to swathes of job losses and rising wealth inequality.
Tech leaders are increasingly concerned about a public and political backlash against AI and AI companies if the technology is not seen to be improving the lives of ordinary workers.
An eight-month study into how AI tools changed the workloads of employees at a US technology company, published by the Harvard Business Review in February, found that the tools did not reduce work but “consistently intensified it”.
Researchers found that employees used the efficiency gains from AI to take on additional tasks, work more during breaks and handle more tasks at the same time. The researchers warned that, for workers, “the cumulative effect is fatigue, burnout and a growing sense that work is harder to step away from, especially as organisational expectations for speed and responsiveness rise”.
A further analysis of 164,000 workers’ digital work activity by ActivTrak, the productivity software company, found that after AI adoption, work intensified across almost every category — with the time spent on email and messaging more than doubling.
OpenAI’s blueprint, “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First”, argues that the increasing power of AI means there needs to be a national conversation about how it is governed to benefit humans.
Policy recommendations in the paper also include exploring a robot tax as one measure to shift the tax burden more on to businesses as AI is expected to boost corporate profits and capital gains, while reducing revenue from income taxes.
OpenAI proposed giving every US citizen a stake in AI-driven economic growth by creating a “public wealth fund” that “could invest in diversified, long-term assets that capture growth in both AI companies and the broader set of firms adopting and deploying AI”.
Returns from the fund could be distributed directly to citizens, allowing more people to directly benefit from AI “regardless of their starting wealth or access to capital”, according to the blueprint.
Altman, 40, is racing against other tech companies to build “superintelligence”, or “AI systems capable of outperforming the smartest humans even when they are assisted by AI”.
However a poll of 1,000 US voters between February 27 and March 3 by NBC News found that only 26 per cent had a positive view of AI, while 46 per cent saw it negatively. There has also been a growing backlash against AI data-centre construction in the US, as communities fear they will lead to higher energy bills.
The state of Maine has proposed banning the construction of any major new data centres until November 2027 so it can review the potential impact on the environment and electricity grid.
Vinod Khosla, an American billionaire venture capitalist and OpenAI investor, warned policymakers last month that “fear of AI” would be the biggest issue for voters in 2028, as he expects mass job disruption in the coming years.
“Everybody has great insecurity, and we should be addressing that ahead of the election,” he told the Hill and Valley Forum, an annual conference in Washington that brings together policymakers and technology executives.
Mark Warner, the Democratic senator for Virginia, also warned the conference of the likelihood of political upheaval, as he expects US college graduate unemployment to rise from 9 per cent at present to as high as 35 per cent within the next two years.
“If we don’t figure this out — I say this as a pro-AI, pro-tech guy — we are going to get screwed,” he said. “You are going to have populism from the left and right try to cut off this innovation. And I don’t think we actually have even the basic foundation of how we get this transition right.”